Monday, 13 August 2007

I thought I'd save some of you time and tell you how I got Mac OS X 10.4.9 installed on my old iMac G3 350 (which we're using for testing noatikl and liptikl, as a low-end Mac platform).

The problem is that the old Mac only ran Mac OS 10.3.x, and I wanted to install Mac OS X 10.4.x ... and upgrade the memory and the hard drive.

However, Mac OS 10.4.x comes on a DVD, but this old Mac only has a slot-loading CD-ROM drive that cannot read the Mac OS install DVD! Also, the Mac has very little memory to start with (64 MB!) and, to crown it all, only had a puny 8 GB hard drive!

The steps I followed are given here. Note that you *could* instead return your DVD media to Apple and exchange for CD-ROM copy, but that would cost you around 10 pounds and that is money which would be better spent IMO towards a DVD-ROM drive that you can use from more than one computer. But that is just my opinion!

Shopping

Get yourself a larger replacement IDE drive! An old Mac like this can't read *really* big drives, so I got an 80 GB IDE/ATA drive for around 25 pounds from ebuyer.

Get yourself a USB-2 IDE/USB adaptor! I got mine for around ... guess what... 25 pounds from the local Maplin. We use this to connect to both our new hard drive (if you want to back-up your data via another Mac, for example) and the DVD-ROM drive.

Get yourself a basic ***INTERNAL*** IDE/ATA DVD-ROM drive! (Yes, INTERNAL!) I got mine for around 25 pounds from the local PC world, going relatively cheap. Internal drives are a lot cheaper than external drives, and I use the IDE/USB adaptor to connect this drive temporarily *externally* to the Mac via the USB/IDE adaptor (see later!)

Get yourself some more RAM! I got two 128 MB memory chips from a couple of old PCs, or you could buy what you need from e.g. crucial.com ...

Install the RAM upgrade

Take-out your old RAM, and upgrade it!

Verify your Mac reboots with the upgraded RAM!

Upgrade your Hard Disk

If you have a spare Mac with enough disk-space (!)

Take-out your old hard drive from your iMac. You'll find-out how to do this through google.

Plug-in your old drive Mac to the IDE/USB adaptor, to your other Mac...

Use the wonderful "Super-Duper" program to copy the contents of your old drive to space on your other Mac

Plug-in your new drive, formated it with a suitable partition using Disk Utility, and use SuperDuper to copy the backup data on to the new drive ... again, using the USB/IDE adaptor.

Plug-in your new drive back into your old Mac, and verify that it still boots up!

Plug-in the "internal" DVD drive to your old Mac, using the IDE/USB adaptor. :) It'll make sense when you try it. Insert your Mac OS DVD. Hold down the "option" key when rebooting as the start-up bong plays, and you will soon be given the option to boot-up from the DVD drive. Install Mac OS!

If you do NOT have a spare Mac...! ...

Take-out your old hard drive from your iMac. You'll find-out how to do this through google.

Plug-in your new drive back into your old Mac

Plug-in the DVD drive to your old Mac, using the IDE/USB adaptor. Insert your Mac OS DVD. Hold down the "option" key when booting as the start-up bong plays, and you will soon be given the option to boot-up from the DVD drive. Install Mac OS!

Turn-off your Mac. Plug-in your old drive to your Mac via the IDE/USB adaptor. Restart your Mac. You'll see the your old drive appear on the desktop as an icon. Copy-across whatever data you want to restore form your old Mac drive to your new Mac drive... being careful not to overwrite anything you shouldn't!

That is "all" there is to it! Don't blame me if this steps don't work! ;)